Steve Ritter and his wife, Pam, hadn’t been in business at Sandy Springs Farm in western Jackson County long when the late Charlie Yeager visited. He was the county agent in Jackson County. Today, he would be an Extension educator. Some of us still prefer the old terminology.

“We were raising beef cattle, and Yeager figured I needed some advice,” Ritter recalls. “He told me that the best thing you could feed a mama cow was ground ear corn and alfalfa hay. I took his advice, and we’ve been doing it ever since.”

Today, Ritter has a 50-cow Angus herd, and he still harvests ear corn. He picks it with a two-row New Idea picker. The pull-type New Idea picker was one of the last models made in the factory at Coldwater, Ohio, before the company ceased making ear corn pickers.

Ritter and his wife have raised cows for 40 years. He also works off the farm. The main change he has made in his ration recently is adding some dried distillers grains to raise the protein content. He’s heard a similar recommendation from a Purdue University veterinarian.   

Time-tested
Only a limited number of people harvest ear corn today. Likely, fewer still do it with a two-row New Idea corn picker. But Ritter’s success in his feeding program is proof that just because a practice is old doesn’t mean it won’t work.

After all, cover crops are one of the hottest things going today, yet your grandpa likely used cover crops decades ago. He may have plowed them under in the spring and called it "green manure" instead of burning them down and no-tilling into it, but the principle was the same — keep the ground covered in the winter, and keep something growing.

Just like Ritter has improved his ration by incorporating dried distillers grains, a product that wasn’t readily available when most farmers still picked corn on the ear, many people have figured out that if they incorporate modern herbicides and burn down cover crops after they grow in the spring, they can capture more benefit than just soil protection. Cover crops also help capture nitrogen left in the soil and build organic matter over time.

Fond memories
When Ritter sent pictures of ear corn going up the elevator into the corn crib, it brought back memories. My father milked cows, and until he sold them in 1978, he picked and cribbed ear corn. I still remember golden ears of corn going up the elevator and disappearing into the corn crib on a sunny October afternoon. Sometimes it was a foggy November morning, but it was still a wholesome feeling to see the year’s harvest go into storage.

GOLDEN SIGHT: If you farmed in the '50s and '60s, this should look familiar. It’s still familiar to Steve Ritter, who prefers feeding ground ear corn to his beef cows.

It wasn’t long before I learned how to use our feed grinder and scoop out ear corn from the crib to prepare feed for the cows. Like Ritter and the county agent who gave him the advice, my dad found that ground ear corn worked well as feed for dairy cows.

I ground that feed with something that is almost as historic as the New Idea corn picker. It was a big orange Bear Cat feed grinder, made by the Western Land Roller Co.

It was a different time, but technology that worked then still works today. Ritter is proof positive!